In my work as a Short Story Acquisitions Editor at History Through Fiction, I frequently have to deliver bad news. Your story was not selected.  Most authors are great about it.  They understand that I don’t like telling them we can’t publish their story, but it is my job to choose which stories History Through Fiction will publish on their member site.

Occasionally, I get an angry email, which means that a writer has gone to the trouble of looking up my email address, since we use a submission platform, and they have taken the time to write me, and they have also hit send on that email.

You may have heard this advice before.  If you need to vent your frustration, by all means, write the email.  But, don’t send it. Let it sit overnight and read it again in the morning, after a good night’s sleep and your favorite morning beverage. Do you still feel like you need to send it?  

Ask yourself this question.  Are you a professional?  Professional writers know that rejection is part of the way things work. What one platform rejects might be just the thing for another platform. Agent/Editor A may love what Agent/Editor B hates.  Consider the possibility that your work isn’t quite ready for publication.  Yet.  That doesn’t mean that it will never be.

Publishing is a small world, and there is a good chance we will run into each other at conferences, on committees—you might even want to submit to me again in the future.  If you’ve sent that indignant email, you may have burnt a bridge that you will want in the future.  

When you receive a rejection, consider your options:

1. Do nothing.  Wait to see what others you have queried say about the piece.  They might accept it.
2. Use the rejection as motivation to keep working.  Ask for feedback from someone you trust to determine if you need to revise.
3. Take the rejection as a badge of your professionalism.  ALL professional writers have been rejected at some point.

Above all, please don’t take it personally.  It isn’t personal.  It is one rejection of one piece at one moment in time by one outlet.  In no way is it a predictor of anything.

PS—please don’t email asking for feedback after a rejection if none was included in the original message.  Agents and editors are not lying when they say that the volume of submissions is too large to provide individual feedback to each writer.  If I can provide anything that I think might be helpful, I do, but there are not enough hours in the day to give detailed feedback to every writer who submits.  It is not personal, I promise.

If you have a short story you would like to submit to History Through Fiction, I am waiting to read it!  You can find out more about the submission process here.

In a previous blog post, I wondered whether your draft might be like a hoarder’s house.  In this post, we will look at a different issue, the scattered draft.

One of my volunteer gigs is to teach a children’s Bible class in Tallinn at our church.  My class is very small, and the students are all under the age of five.  A few weeks ago, I learned a new word from one of my little friends.  She said her star coloring was “jaga jaga.”  I loved this word immediately, but I wanted to understand its meaning.  Her father kindly explained to me that it is slang in his native country Nigeria, which means “scattered.”  Jaga jaga is the perfect onomatopoeia!  It sounds like your thoughts are scattered.  

So, is your draft a little jaga jaga?

Do you have SO MANY plot points that you aren’t sure what the main plot is?  Are there subplots to the subplots?  Do you drop threads right and left?  Is Chekhov’s gun left sitting on the mantel for the whole novel without ever being fired?

Do not despair?  You can fix it.  

Many first time novelists think that in order to sustain a novel length project they have to keep throwing in surprises to keep the narrative drive going.  Eventually they’ve twisted so many times, no one knows what is going on, including them.

Once you have a draft, even if it is a little jaga jaga, look for the throughline.  What is the main plot?  If you can’t see the forest for the trees, try coming at it from the main character’s viewpoint.  What is their main goal for the novel?  What are the obstacles standing in their way?  What choices do they make?  Once you map out a clear path for them, you’ll be on the way to getting some clarity for your novel.

If you would like to work on your inciting incident and how it works to make your main character choose, please consider joining me for a free webinar, Wallop Your What If: Imagine a Better Inciting Incident.  We’ll go through some questions and examples to make sure that your first big plot event has the power to propel your main character through a novel.

I love to work on manuscript reviews.  When an author has a completed draft that they are willing to let an Editor Book Coach review, it signals their commitment to the writing process and to doing the best work they can.  They are serious about writing a good book.

As you may suspect, there tend to be patterns in early drafts, things that a lot of writers do, that we can all learn from.  One of these is akin to hoarding. 

If you’ve ever watched a reality show about hoarders or known one in real life, you will be familiar with the way, to varying degrees, it can be difficult to navigate inside their homes.  There is so much stuff that it blocks the path, or sometimes only allows you to walk through in a narrow passage.  You cannot see the whole room, because the furniture or knick knacks or boxes are in the way.  You cannot see out the windows, because they are blocked.  It is dark.  There might be beauty in the house, but you cannot tell, because it is obscured by the sheer volume of things.  Things that the owner cannot let go.

Sometimes writers are like hoarders. They want to cram LOTS of backstory into their novel, because the reader needs it, they think.  Sometimes the first version of a plot resembles a “choose your own adventure” with all the options taken.  There are too many details for the reader to pay attention to.  There are extra scenes which seem to have no purpose, but they are really important! There are so many characters, the reader needs a scorecard to remember their names or keep up with the relationships.

If this sounds familiar, do not despair!  Early drafts are where writers work out the story, figure out what the characters’ goals are, and literally find their way to the story they want to tell.  The trick is, that a writer, unlike a hoarder, has to be willing to let some things go. Let the plot shine by simplifying it.  Give the details that matter to the reader and shed those that don’t. Allow the beauty of your prose to be visible by removing the detritus that is overshadowing it.  Revision is the process of reorganizing, rewriting, and refining what you’ve done.  Like editing your closet or your home, it requires that some things go.  But it also means that what remains will be more useful, more beautiful, and more easily accessed by the reader.

If you have a finished draft—well done!  Your work is just beginning.